RS232 and Arduino

The same MAX board that I had also worked with Arduino at 5V although it was designed for 3.3V operation (capacitors on board were sized for 3.3V operation - page 10 of MAX3243 datasheet). Still, it seemed to work fine up to 28800 baud rate. Any faster and the software starts detecting data framing errors and the data becomes corrupted.
However, that was purely a design limitation of that particular RS232 board that I had.

Given that I did not have a voltage level translator, I only connected TX1 pin so Arduino would send, but not receive data. That pin exists only on Arduino Mega boards since that's the only board with more than 1 hardware serial ports. I used a sketch "Examples -> Communications -> MultiSerialMega" from the IDE's set of examples. That code simply echoes anything that it gets on its primary serial port (TX0/RX0 or built in through the USB) to the secondary serial port (TX1/RX1).